


we keep using our bodies (like they're medicine)

by JunkerJackrabbit



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Biting, Disaster Lesbians, Eventual Smut, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inaccurate medicine?, Medieval Medicine, Plague, Swearing, Terrible People
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 14:53:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20677220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JunkerJackrabbit/pseuds/JunkerJackrabbit
Summary: PlagueDoctor!Moira Vampire AUFuture chaps will include addt'l characters/time periods





	we keep using our bodies (like they're medicine)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rawrkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rawrkie/gifts).

Her mother always told her that the smallest thing could draw you back into a memory, call to mind a person, a time, a place so far removed that you may otherwise lose it wholly. Silver-haired and cloudy-eyed, Caitlin O'Deorain had spoken with such certainty, a conviction in that stern cadence and laughter in milky eyes as they tended the making of bread and porridge in the kitchen one late autumn morning.

_There are some things, a stór, that you will always remember. That linger on the periphery, like the smell of damp leaves and dark earth._

She remembers the sound of the rain on the thatch in the summer.

The sharp sting of a scraped knees, nearly falling into a fairy hole out on the moors.

It hadn't been her fault that she missed the step, or at least she told herself such then. It was the distraction of that bristle of white in the mud and moss, what little remained of a moorland wolf, its thick, red-brown fur peeling back from a too-long skull. The flies buzzing a cacophony of rot and decay. The shrill cry of ravens crowding for their pound of flesh. She wanted a better look, is all. To count the ribs, see the articulation of the joints. How it moved. How it worked. 

How it died. 

Later she would stroll through the wooden fence with mud and blood on her clothes, a wolf's rib clenched in one thin hand, a fistful of black feathers. 

_Twenty-four ribs_, she would tell her grandmother later, as gnarled hands gently daubed the mud from the scraped knees, picked the burrs from her clothes. _As many as me_.

_But how many teeth?_ Nan Caoimhe would ask, and she frowned then, she remembers. Because she hadn't counted them. The great white teeth, glinting in the sun.

She remembers the sound of black-feathered wings in the air, circling overhead. The prickle of sweat along her hairline in the humid afternoon. 

Nan Caoimhe walks back with her, around the fairy holes, out over the moors. They count the ribs, the teeth, the ravens. They leave a crust of bread and a clay saucer of milk for the fair folk on their way back, a dull copper coin, its face so worn she cannot remember the image pressed unto it. 

Later there will be a twinkle in rheumy eyes, a sly wink all the while her mother lectures, voice stern, about the high price of playing with those things beyond their ken. The higher price of deals cut with the fair folk, known or unknown. A dire warning of children lost, lives cut short, spirits that haunt the depths of the fairy holes, bones and blood found in the centre of fairy rings. 

Caitlin O'Deorain is not impressed at her daughter's knowledge - not by the number of teeth, nor the number of ribs, nor the number of caverns that her child has inspected at the behest of her elderly mother. 

_This is how children are lost,_ she hears her mother bemoan, well after she should be asleep. _You shouldn't fill her head with such nonsense._

_She's a curious mind_, Nan Caiomhe responds, ever in her defense. _Twould be a shame to waste it._

She remembers the sound of the wind howling home over the cliffs, the green waves crashing onto the stones of Moher, the way the salt on them glitters in the year that her grandmother dies. The spray kicked up into the air and stung her eyes and lungs, left tear-tracks down a pale, narrow countenance that had something to do with the loss and something to do with the elements both. She remembers how the fog rolled in on the long walk home, made it dangerous to walk where she did. How she went back to the fairy holes that night, looked into each one and found nothing.

In her room later, she would read the books again by candle-light until her eyes burn. 

_Myrrh to clean a poorly wound_. 

_Mint for ailments of the stomach and intestine_.

_Horehound for coughs, particularly those of the chest, like the one that stole her grandmother away in the bitter winter of 1347._

Woodsmoke and horehound will forever remind her of the wet, wheezing cough that sounded from the bed nearest the hearth. Of the way a once-warm voice cracked just like the ribs did from the strain.

_Twenty-four_, Nan Caiomhe had whispered hoarsely in the end. _Just like the wolf,   
sionnach beag._

Little fox. It is something none have called her since.

Horehound and woodsmoke. Fairy rings. Twenty-four ribs in a dead wolf on the moors.

The storm howling home on the Cliffs of Moher.

There are some things that Moira O'Deorain will always remember.

After these, it will always be the scent of London in the summer of 1349.

Because it smells of camphor and roses and wet, dead things left to rot.

Leather and soot. The hollowed-out inside of the raven-like mask that she wears to filter the illness from the humid city air. To prevent the disease that is burning through the heart of the city as if it were made of parchment and all the world a match from taking _her_ with it. She has followed it here from the Cliffs of Moher, from the small, solitary pyre in her village that became two when her mother followed after Nan Caoimhe on swift feet. She has followed it here, because she has little else in the world now, save the journals she brought with her. 

It is far too hot to be stacking bodies in the gutters like so much cordwood. It has not stopped anyone from doing precisely like that, the bloated faces blackened in places with pervasive rot. The rats swarming. She is thankful for the thick soles of her well-oiled boots, which prevent the grime and ichor seeping through as she makes her way up the cobbles. 

She will be more thankful when the others come with their carts to take the bodies away. 

Moira O'Deorain has always been partial to the burning of corpses, the slow spark of embers in the night sky. Beyond the idle poetry and dark smoke, it's clean. It prevents the spread of the disease as near as she can fathom anything may. It is also a recommendation that, prior to London, has suffered her no less than three near-trials for witchcraft in Melcombe for _unorthodox and nigh occult_ practices with the dead.

The last of her many run-ins with the Church. 

She still balks at the defense of the last - _only an Irish peasant, backwards folk, I hear they still believe in fairies_. Enough to acquit her. Enough to cause her change in tactics. 

It is ironic in the extreme that she conducts much of her work now from an abandoned monastery to the Catholic Church. God was, after all, insufficient to prevent its priest from being stricken by the plague, and the nunnery had fallen soon after, which suits her just fine. It makes an ideal space for the makeshift clinic, and she did learn _so very much_ from their symptoms before they went. 

She takes the same route to her offices every day. Back through the merchant stalls, which are emptier by the day, down the cobblestone road toward the blacksmithy. He was the third she knew lost this week, his youngest boy grim and pale behind the anvil now, hiding flecks of blood on the inside of a sleeve after every cough. Spending what little grief time will allow him with each blow of the hammer on the anvil.

She's almost home now. It's little more than a quick stop by the apothecary, and two streets away. 

And what is home? Little more than the cluttered offices of the former priesthood, now crowded with what most would consider small blasphemies. Heavy tomes that contain theorems she's collected from all corners of the known world, herbs and phials, salves for which there is no name in the common tongue, traded for small favours. Two cats, Gabriel's, which she tolerates in such as they keep the mice from the larder and the rats from her patient's bandages. They serve a purpose.

They are more efficient than _prayer_ at keeping disease at bay. 

Prayer had not saved Nan Caoimhe.

Medicine? Moira reasons that medicine may have, had she known enough then to make a difference. And if she cannot have Nan Caoimhe back, she will have the hollow victory she has wrung from the remains of countless failures. 

_Progress is costly._

She walks a little faster, her cane clicking on the cobblestone as she draws near the apothecary.

_Myrrh for wounds._

_Horehound for the rattling cough_.

_Catmint for Gabriel, to keep his little pests content._

Because, as nature would dictate - he will be waiting for her back at her clinic. Perhaps with freshly baked bread for their meal. Perhaps sprawled in what little greenery remains sheltered at the centre of the convent, where the stone walls once meant to protect the nuns now provide an oasis away from the scent of smoke and death. Perhaps, she will tell him about the woman she keeps seeing on the periphery, never for long, there one second and gone the next. Always watching, an intensity to eyes the colour of damp sand and a knowing curl to the corner of those lips.

Sometimes, she believes it to have been little more than a dream. A passing delusion from the heat or the alchemical compounds with which she works. Sometimes, the back of her mind whispers of something far more sinister. Of superstition, of fae come out from their holes in the ground to observe the lives of those so much smaller than themselves.

It is no matter. Soon, she will return to her offices and Gabriel, home after another long stretch of treating patients. Which is much easier to accomplish in London than it has been elsewhere, in her estimation. Perhaps for the simple fact that she has abandoned the feminine presentation entirely.

In truth, it had been Gabriel who sparked the idea, not a year ago as they laid out in the meadows and watched the stars one night, sharing a skin of his father's liquor and a cold leg of mutton as they watched the silver streaks arc over the heavens above. She remembers that day well. It was just after one of her more unpleasant encounters with the village folk.

"_We could always...you know, he had observed with a nonchalant shrug, his voice still wrought to smoke from a fire he should not have survived. The ash-brown skin along the side of his face still bears the scar tissue, but it was redder then, livid with it. He reminds her in some ways of all the realms of medical possibility, for it was her hands that fought death for him when the summer fields caught the year before and scorched through his homestead._

_"Mm?" came her response in the wake of a swallow of whiskey._

_He sprawls back in the grass, shoulder touching hers in the cool meadow grass. It's warm. _

_"Make a go of it," had been his response as he took the skin back from her, tipped it back for another swallow. "I'd treat you right. There'd be less folk nosing into your business. And mine."_

_The sound of her husky laughter had spooked the sheep._

_"Such a man's solution," she had said to him._

_His grin had stretched ear to ear at that, the retort, "You'd make a shit wife anyway._"

And Gabriel, well. He has always had a sort of logic to him. She _would_ make a shit wife, has so many other priorities, chief amongst them her pursuit of knowledge. But it would draw attention from her work, as it would his dalliances with the huntsman's son. He didn't know then that he would spark the idea in the back of her mind, that it would catch like kindling as she watched a comet streak across the sky like fire. 

The taste of whiskey and cool night air on her tongue, she had answered, "Lend me your spare clothes."

In the morning, Gabriel took his straight razor to her hair and lent her his old work clothes, threadbare and stained. They were short in the limb for her, threadbare and stained. She wore them anyways when they set out on the road, a fistful of copper and a skin of whiskey between them. In the next village, it had been different.

Because it was also the first village in which no one spoke of the witch and the bastard.

In the next town, they tell of _those nice lads from the county over_, helping with the harvest and tending to the ill. Because Moira O'Deorain started using the name Murrough, and no one knew better. Just as no one knew Gabriel.

Six towns and London later, it's _Doctor_ O'Deorain.

And that suits her just fine.

Her cane clicks on the cobblestone as she rounds the corner towards the apothecary.

\---

The apothecary is out of what she needs. It necessitates a much longer walk home than she anticipated. One that takes her past the docks, toward a market that none of her compatriots frequent - at least not the timid ones. Childish fear is an unpleasant look on the children of man, and she can see it in their faces when they speak of the far market. It is different from the defined structure of their plagued city, frequented by visitors from other lands, the air rich with spices few know the names of.

It means a walk past the port, where most mistakenly believe that ruffians abound, where many avoid the tough sailors with ink on their arms and too-white smiles on their sunburnt faces, salt in their hair. She offers a curt nod as she makes her way down the street, past the pub with two black dogs painted on the sign, receives a little wave from the tall, bearded Dane serving tankards of some thick brew. 

Last year, when a horse shied and took off with a wagon, his son had been its path. She still remembers the frantic knock-knock-knocking upon the clinic door in the wee hours of the morning, the tall man with a boy in his arms, the red-limned eyes of his wife as they pleaded for help in a language she does not speak, barely understands the sentiment of now by inflection alone. Hands stained red in the late hours of the evening, working by the light of a guttering candle, she had saved the boy and lost the limb. It was acceptable collateral, a cost worth paying for a life.

She had not found out later how many of her supposed _fellows_ turned him away. Had he come to her first, she may have been able to save the limb. It is not a truth that she shared with them. In any case, the wooden prosthetic that Gabriel carved to replace it seems to cause the youth no harm, and he has adjusted well. Often times, the youth accompanies her down to the market, chattering in a mixture of broken English and his mother tongue, and carrying the sachets and baskets of herbs and spices back to the clinic for her.

They are good people. These are hard times. She will not permit him to carry her purchases today, waves him off as he starts to run out into the street, offers a tip of the hat and a smile to soften the blow. The disease at the heart of London burns too bright. Best that he stay here, near the docks, where the air is still a touch clear and the smoke doesn't choke the sky. 

Almost there. Another ten minutes finds her down amidst the tents, brightly-coloured and vivid, a sharp counterpoint to the remainder of the city. There are far more cats, for one, and she has watched time and time again as this city watch or that has come down to tend to _witch's familiars_ only to be driven back by a hail of stones, the merchants hiding their feline compatriots in baskets and cupboards until the danger has past. 

It was Gabriel, indirectly, she muses as she makes her way down amidst the merchants, starts to sift through all the little sachets of herbs, phials of oils from across the sea, that helped her start to put it all together. The witch hunts. The extermination of cats. The rapid spread of the plague. It is the nature of man to fear what he does not understand, and it is the nature of the Church, in her estimation, to capitalize upon that fear and use it for their own gain. Amusing, in that their self-righteousness led to their own early end. Less so in that it led to many other's. 

And yet, the disease does not insidiously persist at the docks, here, in this middle ground between London and the outer world. Its foothold is less secure, as brightly as it burns elsewhere amidst the rich and purportedly righteous. Because _cats_ still roam here, which means that the _mice_ and other little vermin do not run as thick, are far less able to efficiently spread pestilence wherever they go. 

It's with relief that she reaches toward the back of her head and undoes the cold metal buckle of the mask shielding her from the infection at the city's heart. Uttering a low sound of contentment as it slides free, baring her countenance to the thready, pale sun, she tucks it beneath her arm along with her hat and simply relishes the feeling of the air a moment. A moment longer, her hand raking through sweat-damp copper hair to push it out of her eyes. 

The air here smells like nothing in London. Distinct, like black pepper and vanilla, lingering around the little tents as she wanders. Incense and smoky tea waft through the air, touched with only a kiss of woodsmoke from the little stoves on which the merchants brew their tea and coffee from half a world away. 

Her countenance is sharp, the sort of features that could be cut from stone, their complexion as pale as marble and dusted over at the bridge of her nose - and beneath the crisp lines of her suit, her coat, with cinnamon-tinted freckles. They are all the more prominent in the pale light of the waning sun. It is the eyes, however, that draw the most attention - unsettle. Behind the copper of her lashes, one gleams as blue as the winter sea, while the other carries the scarlet of freshly-spilled blood on the cobblestones. It has always been this way. 

The corner of her lips quirks at a soft, passing gasp from another nearby, a young woman dressed in embroidered reds and vibrant purples, who turns a little pink when those heterochromatic eyes shift her way. Moira offers a sly wink, a husky little chuckle when that pink turns to red, a lower lip worried between the teeth and a quiet laugh before the girl hurries off. If she's not careful, she muses, returning to her perusal of the wares in their neat wicker baskets, Doctor _Murrough_ may develop a reputation as a womanizer. 

It would _hardly_ be the first time. 

But something stirs in her here, standing in the market in the scarlet-tinged light of early evening, the sun gleaming from her hair and in her eyes. The bitter leaves that she cups in the palms of her hands smell familiar, cloying. It is comfortably dark. She cannot quite place it.

"What does this contain?" she asks the man behind the rows of jars, the wooden shelves, uncertain of when or how she ended up inside. The walls are a breathtaking shade of blue, embroidered with scenes from the desert. Curious animals, low reds and purples, indigos that paint over dunes, unknown monoliths that linger on the horizon. She taps a nail to the blown glass of the jar, the sound curiously loud.

"...ah," the wiry man looks up from his beverage, his dark eyes inquisitive, then a little unsettled - though whether at her presence or the question remains unclear. His accent is dry, like moth-eaten scraps of velvet. "It is not a thing we sell much any longer."

She doesn't remember coming in here.

Rising from the cushion on which he's seated, his cup of _something_ still in hand, the merchant makes his way over. He's a full head and a half shorter than her, reaches only to partly to her shoulder. He carries the scent of _copper_ and earth, and it worms its way into her head.

Reaching over, he points out the different bits of petal and leaf as he speaks, "It's a mixture of dried rose and carnation. A little bit of mint, some proprietary spices. You see the white crystal, yes?"

She nods slowly, lifts her cupped hands to draw in the scent and wonders where she has known it before. 

"Camphor," he elaborates, and she realizes that he has gone uncharacteristically till beside her, his dark eyes a little wide and more than a little tense. She isn't certain _why_, and she _knows what camphor is_, but doesn't protest as he continues to speak, "It opens the nasal passages. We used to do brisker business with the doctors uptown when there were more. They would put it in these...wards away illness, some of the odors of the occupation."

His fingertip, stained with something she can't identify, taps to the mask beneath her arm. 

"Camphor and roses," she whispers to herself, and uses her fingertips to sift through the mixture, attempting to discern what else was used. Meeting the shopkeep's dark eyes, she ventures, "Juniper. Ambergris."

She pauses, inhales once more and asserts, "Resin...perhaps from evergreen?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny," the shopkeep retorts in good humor, the sense of unease gone. He looks impressed. "You have a nose for this, it seems."

The texture reminds her of something, and she hisses softly when she nicks a fingertip on one of the crystals, a bead of crimson welling up there. Lifting it to her lips, she licks away the bead of blood, and as simply as that, everything in her mind shudders to a halt in an instant. 

It pulls something out of her. Something that skitters and crawls. Something gleaming and _red_.

All of a sudden, the air is too crisp. Too clean. The sun too bright where it ekes through the holes in the tent overhead, burning where it touches her skin. She feels a heavy weight on her chest, her throat constricting, and feels rather than hears the wet crackle of drowning in her own lungs like a distant memory.

"_There you are, little firefly,_" the voice that she hears is there, but not there. It purrs in the back of her mind, behind the shell of her ear. She can feel the breath and it isn't warm. The voice drawls. Sibilant. It holds an eerie melody that speaks to her of cold desert stone and places long forgotten. Places that she has never been. And she can hear it like ripples in a well at the centre of an oasis, the deep waters tinged in scarlet, something with scales moving lazily beneath the water. 

She jumps suddenly when a hand settles on her shoulder.

"Doctor?" the hand is the merchant's, and she jumps again as she jolts back into the waking world.

"Don't," the word falls from her lips lowly, a lost look in her eyes as she places her fingertips to the side of her throat, for some reason expecting them to come away _red_.

A tremor runs through her, and she chases that memory down through the dark, where so many things go to die. Down to where the air smells of incense. Of roses and camphor, and the taste of copper lingers on her tongue like a new coin.

_The woman with the sand-coloured eyes, the strange mark scrawled beneath one of them, ink and soot on bronzed skin. Standing at the doorstep. Those eyes shimmer gold when they catch the light of the fire inside. Gold like a coin. Like sand. Like whiskey in a bottle on the far shelf. Like the memory of the sun when it was still new. _

_Silks. Blue and white. So different from the clothes she wears. The layers. The performance of the masculine necessary to continue her work. And where did she first see her before? Where, indeed. The silk is soft between her fingertips when she reaches out, rubs the hem of a sleeve between the forefinger and thumb._

_The image shimmers and shudders an instant, solidifies. She doesn't remember what they were conversing about on the doorstep. She only just inside, the other only just out. But those slender hands, firmer to the touch than she expected and curiously cold, reach out, trace over the line of her jaw. Take her head into their palms with a deceptive gentleness._

_Why are her hands so cold._

_"Look at you," that voice promises, those eyes like wet sand holding a frightening intensity, threatening to swallow her whole. Thumbs stroke up, over her cheekbones, and she can feel every fine movement of those hands, firm as marble and cold as ice beneath bronze skin. The lips are colder still when it comes, little more than a chaste peck to the corner of her lips. "So soon. We are nearly there."_

_"I could tell you so many things, yarea," and that voice, golden and warm like the sun setting on a desert horizon, is so close. Just over the doorstep, quiet where it whispers against her cheeks. The other woman smells of sand and myrrh, cardamom, vanilla, the little spices that her less local patients have oft offered small gifts of to show their thanks. The words make a shiver run up her spine for reasons other than the cold, "All you have to do is invite me in."_

"Doctor!" the merchant's voice is louder now, his grip on her arm painful, and it all slips away like water. His dark eyes meet hers, searching as if he may be able to discern where it all went wrong.

The herbs fall between her fingers, spill back into their container, and she fastens the lid over to secure them.

"I'll take them," she informs him brusquely, dropping a handful of coins into his palm without counting. Already headed toward the door as he looks down at his hand, counts out more coins than the jar is worth.

But she is already gone.

The night is young, and there is still work to do.


End file.
